Difference
Our natures may be taken as a departure point for understanding
our differences. Sex, race and (dis)ability supply a biological or
corporeal starting point for understanding the basis of our
differences. But this is only the beginning. Difference is also self
identified and socially ascribed. This is when the cultural accretions
to our natures, and our social relations of difference, become so very
manifest and critical. Dimensions of difference include: ethnicity/race
(and indigenous, immigrant, minority and colonising positions), gender
(and sexual orientation), socio-economic group, locale (global and
regional) and (dis)ability. Here begins a list which, in these times
quite sensitive to difference, all-too-easily becomes a glib litany. So
what do we do to rise above the glibness and the sometimes justified
accusations of 'political correctness'?

Diversity
Diversity is the stuff of normative agendas, where difference
becomes the basis of a program of action. Difference the insistent
reality becomes diversity the agent of change. Many an historical and
contemporary response to difference is hardly worthy of the name
'diversity'—racism, discrimination and systematic inequity. As a
normative agenda and social program, diversity also stands in
contradistinction to systems of exclusion, separation or assimilation.

Globalisation
The normative agenda of diversity has become all the more
pressing as we enter a moment we might call total globalisation. This
is the moment, which we may reach in the imminent future, when the
global becomes the primary domain of action and representation of
commerce, governance and personality. There have been other moments of
globalisation, to be sure: a moment when gathering and hunting
societies came to live across and speak about most of the earth's
habitable lands; then a moment of farming, writing and the formation of
societies on four continents so unequal that their rulers could afford
to order buildings substantial enough to leave the ruins of
'civilisation'; then modern imperialism, industrialism and nationalism;
and now, perhaps, a new moment?

If there is a new moment, it is one on which there is no place that
cannot be reached in person by modern transport, in conversation
through modern communications, in representation through modern media,
or by products and services through modern markets. And because they
can be reached, almost invariably they are reached.

The incipient fact of total globalisation brings with it a normative
agenda for diversity: the agenda of globalism. This agenda plays itself
through in the heartlands of the emerging world order—the heartlands of
commerce, governance and personality. Here we find paradoxes at play
across the world of differences: the paradox of convergence which
fosters divergence and the paradox of universalisation which
accentuates difference.

CommerceIn the domain of production, distribution and
exchange, diverse labour forces work in organisations that increasingly
defy national borders and strive to take their capital and commodities
to the ends of the earth. Far from the founding logic of industrialism
(mass production, mass markets, the lowest common denominator logic of
deskilled workforces and one-size-fits-all view of consumers), the new
commerce talks of mass customisation, complementarities amongst the
persons on diverse teams, catering to niche markets and staying close
to customers in all their variability. We could go so far as to claim
that a new systems logic might be emerging in this, a kind of
'productive diversity'. To make such a claim would be to go way beyond,
or even dispense with, regimes of affirmative action and
demographically defined regulatory compliance. It would also be to set
an equity agenda for productive life, in which even minimalist
approaches to diversity and incremental approaches to inequality are,
as a general rule, an improvement on unreflective discrimination.

Governance
In the realm of civic life, local and national
communities daily negotiate the differences resulting from immigration,
refugee movement, settlement and indigenous claims to prior ownership
and sovereignty. And at the same time, communities increasingly
recognise and negotiate a plethora of other intersecting and sometimes
contrary differences. Going beyond multiculturalism at the local and
national level, it may be possible in this moment to create a kind of
'civic pluralism', a new way of living in community based on multiple
layers of sovereignty and multiple citizenship. Not only does this
transcend the old civic—the nation-state of more or less
interchangeable identical individuals and its legitimating rhetoric of
nationalism. It also promises to move beyond trivialising and
marginalising forms of multiculturalism, and to address afresh the
nature and forms of 'human rights'.

Personality
Difference sits deep in our consciousnesses, our
epistemologies, our subjectivities and our means of production of
meaning. No longer can we assume there to be a universal personality
(normal or remediable), because the universal today is personalities
emphatically in the plural (the range of our differences), and also in
the multiple (the layered complexity of the differences within us—for
every individual the unique intersection of attributes, the nature and
sources of which may often be ascribed to groups and socialisation).
This bit of gender, that bit of race, the other bit of socio economic
group—this is the stuff of our personalities in the plural and the
multiple. Together, these manifest themselves as the complexity of our
dispositions, our sensibilities, our identities.

The Diversity Conference and The International Journal of Diversity
in Organisations, Communities and Nations examine the realities of
difference and diversity today, empirically and critically as well as
optimistically and strategically. At a time of virulent reactions to
difference and globalisation (ethnonationalism, racist backlash,
parochialism and protectionism), there is a pressing need to reflect
critically on the shape and the possibilities of the normative agendas
of diversity and globalism. The Conference and the Journal are places
for thinking and speaking about these pressing matters, and in ways
that range from the 'big picture' and the theoretical, to the very
practical and everyday business of negotiating difference and diversity
in organisations, communities and civic life.